The EU Has a Plan To Break Up Google

An anonymous reader points out a report at the Financial Times (paywalled) which says the European Parliament is preparing to call for the break-up of Google. According to the draft seen by the FT, a potential solution to ongoing anti-trust concerns with Google is "unbundling search engines from other services." The article notes, "The European parliament has no formal power to split up companies, but has increasing influence on the commission, which initiates all EU legislation. The commission has been investigating concerns over Google’s dominance of online search for five years, with critics arguing that the company’s rankings favour its own services, hitting its rivals’ profits. Unbundling cannot be excluded, said Andreas Schwab, a German MEP who is one of the motion’s backers."

Comments

What's so special about Google?

[PhrostyMcByte]

The EU seems to have a chip on their shoulders about Google. I get it, they're huge and they need to be kept on a leash. But when are we going to see them go after other huge companies abusing their market share? We have Amazon regularly putting full-page ads for their latest electronics right on their front page.

Re:What's so special about Google?

[rahvin112]

Kept on a leash. Lets be honest here, the ONLY thing that keeps someone from using another competing search engine is nothing at all. The only reason people use Google is because it's better, the minute they stop being better and people will quit using it. I don't consider it much of a monopoly when the barrier to entry is almost nothing.

I don't particularly like them fronting their own service but again, no one is forcing anyone to use Google. It's not even the default search engine for the predominant desktop system! This appears to be being driven by the German politicians who are bowing to their own content industry to try to force google to give them a piece of their search business.

I can't help but feel that this entire push is slimy corruption politics typical to Europe where they try to protect local businesses and harm foreign ones using dubious legal means which are often against WTO agreements.

Re:What's so special about Google?

[rahvin112]

If you think the barrier to entry in the search market is low, you should have a talk with Yahoo or MS, both of which have spent a billion or three on what you call "almost nothing". Either they're all idiots, or you're missing something.

The only barrier to entry is a good search engine that turns out results people want. It's not that hard, but it's far to easy to want to screw up those results to boost revenue, something yahoo was notorious for. Microsoft's biggest expenses related to search were advertising (such as buying Yahoo's search business) and trying to convince people they could be trusted, so far they've mostly failed at both. Even at that Bing is still not as good at returning results as Google is. Maybe that's because Google's entire company is devoted to search and Yahoo and Microsoft are devoted to other things with search being a second class citizen in the company.

But actually a good thing. Of course you'll deny that if you drank too much of the neo-conservative cool-aid, but to any thinking person it's quite clear that the total dominance of a few global superplayers is not beneficial to the market or the people.

You might like putting people in jars but I don't, please don't attempt to classify my political leanings by putting me in a jar, particularly one I despise. The problem with your argument is that the total dominance of Google as you claim could be replaced overnight by people typing a different URL in the bar. There is no barrier to entry other than excellence in search. What I see in search is a very functional and competitive market place. Google messes up once and the lions at their door will eat their market-share in a matter of months. The total lack of barrier's to entry, the ease with which consumers can switch and the fact that prices are falling indicates a healthy free-market, even if one of the players is dominant. All regulations will do in a situation like this is break the functioning market. I'm all for regulating markets, just not doing it to ones that are functioning relatively freely.

European regulations should be focusing on the edges of the market where Google is trying to manipulate things, such as forcing them to randomize product listing instead of always listing their own first. Or making sure they don't turn their Android system into a vehicle to mobile control (but by all reports Europe has a healthier mobile competition than the US with a functional player in Microsoft). Or even leveraging their android wear or android car to gain control of other markets. Again though the touch should be light, by all accounts these markets are free and functional. Overly heavy regulation is as damaging as no regulation at all.

EU is getting too powerful

[DavenH]

Time to break the EU into several different countries.

Re:In an unrelated news item...

[Em Adespoton]

Europe disappeared from the worldwide web today.

Would that be because the EU parliament exercised their right to be forgotten?

Re:In an unrelated news item...

[Tom]

This stupid nonsense is posted every time the EU acts in relation to american companies.

It's among the worst nationalistic hogwash misconceptions ever, easily on par with North Korea rambling about its moon base.

The EU is bigger than the USA in almost every metric, especially on the important ones: Population count (507 mio. vs. 319 mio.) and GDP (18.4 trio. US$ vs. 16.8 trio. US$).

Any big american company deciding to withdraw from Europe would have its board of directors kicked out faster than they can sign the paperwork to make it happen, or watch its stock crash & burn, because they've just not only moved out of its biggest market, they've also given a free playing ground for a global competitor to emerge unchallenged.

Re:Google doesn't have a monopoly on ANYTHING.

[Tom]

My point is that the EU is a bunch of arrogant idiots who have no business telling an American company to split up.

Like it or not, idiots or not, they do have such business, simply because your poor little "american company" is no such thing. It's an international corporation that was once founded in america, but now does business all over the world, including within the EU and actually quite a lot of it.

Re:Google doesn't have a monopoly on ANYTHING.

[johnjaydk]

Not only that, but the EUSSR doesn't seem to understand that an American corporation has nothing to do with European communists. They should go and re-read their history books and remember how close all of Europe was to speaking either German or Russian.

I could have moderated your drivel to hell but that wouldn't help much.

The EU commision can't tell US companies to do anything but they can set conditions for allowing them to operate within the EU. It's called sovereignty and the US does it too all the time. Having a beef with virtual or actual monopolies is not exactly a communist thing either. A monopoly is a direct attack on the free market and therefore upsets true free market believers.

The US have a long, although not resent, history of cracking down on monopolies. The Standard Oil case is the poster child for this kind of policy.

Re:Google doesn't have a monopoly on ANYTHING.

[sabri]

The EU commision can't tell US companies to do anything but they can set conditions for allowing them to operate within the EU. It's called sovereignty and the US does it too all the time. Having a beef with virtual or actual monopolies is not exactly a communist thing either. A monopoly is a direct attack on the free market and therefore upsets true free market believers.

Finally at least a reply that contains an actual argument. Thanks for that.

I actually agree with you. The EU can set conditions for allowing a company to operate within the EU. However, they EU should not be in a position to split up a privately owned enterprise. If they feel that Google has too big of a market share, than they should encourage competition. Which, BTW, there is a lot of. Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo, Ask.com (yikes) and many others.

In the case of Microsoft's anti-trust case, there was no such thing. Most people and business needed a Windows PC because (at the time) it was pretty much the only thing that would be compatible with your neighbor's PC. MS controlled the desktop. Switching required a installing a new operating system, and most people didn't even know how to do that let alone that they were even aware of alternatives.

Google does not control your search engine. Internet Explorer defaults to Bing, and soon Firefox will default to Yahoo. It is easy to switch default search engines, all you need is to change a bookmark. However, I prefer Google simply because it's better and a lot of people will do the same.

Having a better product than others doesn't necessarily mean you're an illegal monopoly. Google's perceived monopoly can be gone in six months, as soon as a competitor brings a better product.

Look at Myspace vs Facebook, for example.

Re:In an unrelated news item...

[theVarangian]

But this represents an existential threat - when viewed that way, it's a no-brainer to give up a market, even a huge market, if the price of admission is too high. Also, Google doesn't have to stop serving them, just stop doing business there.

Also, don't forget that Google pulled out of China, and China has a lot more population and will have the biggest GDP shortly. This is far more concerning than a little espionage.

But China was demanding a bit more than the EU who merely wants Google to break up it's operations in the EU into separate business units. China wanted Google to censor web searches and rat out Chinese citizens for regime critical utterances and activities. Pulling out of China in the face of those demands makes sense since Google's position as an information broker depends to a large extent on whether the public trusts them or not. If a large number of people get the notion that Google cannot be trusted, Google could easily see a collapse of it's share of the internet search market. Of course somebody will inevitably ignore this fact and go straight to pointing out that Google feeds information about it's users to the NSA as a matter of course (and as if that was a proven fact) to which I'll respond that I'm no friend of Google, I think they have become a dangerous monopolist, but I'll also consider them innocent of collaborating with the NSA until they are proven guilty.

Re:Google doesn't have a monopoly on ANYTHING.

[matbury]

It's funny that you say EUSSR. The European Central Bank is one of the most fundamentalist free-market neoliberal banking organisations in the world. It puts the Fed and Wall St. to shame (if you think being fundamentalist free-market neoliberal is a good thing). They're prepared to let whole countries go to rack and ruin for the sake of free-market purity.

And Google have an effective monopoly on search and are abusing it. It's a pretty straightforward case for their companies in the EU being broken up. Isn't that one of the functions of small gubbermint in a fundamentalist free-market neoliberal system? You know, to ensure that there's competition and no one entity can become tyranical?